Reactions to 500lb stripy feline things jumping unexpectedly come from pre-verbal categorisations(the ‘low road’, in Daniel Goleman’s terms), so have nothing to do with word definitions. The same is true for many highly emotionally charged categorisations (e.g. for a previous generation, person with skin colour different from mine....). Words themselves do get their meanings from networks of associations. The content of these networks can drift over time, for an individual as for a culture. Words change their meanings. A deliberate attempt to change the meaning of a word by introducing new associations (e.g. via the media) can be successful. Changes in the meanings of political labels, or the associations with a person’s name, are good examples. Whether the direct amygdala circuit can be reprogramed is a different matter. Certainly not as easily as the neocortex. If you lived in the world of Calvin and Hobbes for six months, would you start to instinctively see large stripy feline things jumping out at you unexpectedly as an invitation to play ?
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Hollerith, if ‘most psychologists are idiots’, I wonder how they discovered all the cognitive biases ?
Under Multiple Worlds, aren’t you condemned, whatever you do or don’t do, to there being a number tending to infinity of worlds where what you want to protect is protected, and a number tending to infinity where it is not ?
Eliezer, I don’t read the main thrust of your post as being about Newcomb’s problem per se. Having distinguished between ‘rationality as means’ to whatever end you choose, and ‘rationality as a way of discriminating between ends’, can we agree that the whole specks / torture debate was something of a red herring ? Red herring, because it was a discussion on using rationality to discriminate between ends, without having first defined one’s meta-objectives, or, if one’s meta-objectives involved hedonism, establishing the rules for performing math over subjective experiences. To illustrate the distinction using your other example, I could state that I prefer to save 400 lives certainly, simply because the purple fairy in my closet tells me to (my arbitrary preferred objective), and that would be perfectly legitimate. It would only be incoherent if I also declared it to be a strategy which would maximise the number of lives saved if a majority of people adopted it in similar circumstances (a different arbitrary preferred objective). I could in fact have as preferred meta-objective for the universe that all the squilth in flobjuckstooge be globberised, and that would be perfectly legitimate. An FAI (or a BFG, for that matter (Roald Dahl, not Tom Hall)) could scan me and work towards creating the universe in which my proposition is meaningful, and make sure it happens. If now someone else’s preferred meta-objective for the universe is ensuring that the princess on page 3 gets a fairy cake, how is the FAI to prioritise ?
A Utilitarian should care about the outcomes of Utilitarianism..… and yes, as soon as ends justify means, you do get Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, who were all striving for good consequences...… Which is relevant, as your arguments mostly involve saving lives (a single type of outcome, so making options intuitively comparable). I’m afraid the ‘rant’ doesn’t add much in terms of content, that I can see.
An AGI project would presumably need a generally accepted, watertight, axiom based, formal system of ethics, whose rules can reliably be applied right up to limit cases. I am guessing that that is the reason why Eliezer et al are arguing from the basis that such an animal exists.
If it does, please point to it. The FHI has ethics specialists on its staff, what do they have to say on the subject ?
Based on the current discussion, such an animal, at least as far as ‘generally accepted’ goes, does not exist. My belief is that what we have are more or less consensual guidelines which apply to situations and choices within human experience. Unknown’s examples, for instance, tend to be ‘middle of the range’ ones. When we get towards the limits of everyday experience, these guidelines break down.
Eliezer has not provided us with a formal framework within which summing over single experiences for multiple people can be compared to summing over multiple experiences for one person. For me it stops there.
Great New Theorem in color perception : adding together 10 peoples’ perceptions of light pink is equivalent to one person’s perception of dark red. This is demonstrable, as there is a continuous scale between pink and red.
The answer to ‘shut up and multiply’ is ‘that’s the way people are, deal with it’. One thing apparent from these exchanges is that ‘inferential distance’ works both ways.
To get back to the ‘human life’ examples EY quotes. Imagine instead the first scenario pair as being the last lifeboat on the Titanic. You can launch it safely with 40 people on board, or load in another 10 people, who would otherwise die a certain, wet, and icy death, and create a 1 in 10 chance that it will sink before the Carpathia arrives, killing all. I find that a strangely more convincing case for option 2. The scenarios as presented combine emotionally salient and abstract elements, with the result that the emotionally salient part will tend to be foreground, and the ‘% probabilities’ as background. After all no-one ever saw anyone who was 10% dead (jokes apart).
Put baldly, the main underlying question is : how do you compare the value of (a) a unit of work expended now, today, on the well-being of a person alive, now, today, with the value of (b) the same unit of work expended now, today, for the well-being of 500 potential people who might be alive in 500 years’ time, given that units of work are in limited supply. I suspect any attempt at a mathematical answer to that would only be an expression of a subjective emotional preference. What is more, the mathematical answer wouldn’t be a discount function, it would be a compounding function, as it would be the result of comparing all the AI units of work available between now and time t in the future, with the units of work required between now and time t to address all the potential needs of humanity and trans-humanity between now and the end of time, which looks seriously like infinity.
Ben Jones, and Patrick (orthonormal), if you offer me 400$ I’ll say ‘yes, thank you’. If you offer me 500$ I’ll say ‘yes, thank you’. If, from whatever my current position is after you’ve been so generous, you ask me to choose between “a certain loss of $100 or a 20% chance of losing $200”, I’ll choose the 20% chance of losing 200$. That’s my math, and I accept money orders, wire transfers, or cash....
James Bach, your point and EY’s are not incompatible : it is a given that what you care about and give importance to is subjective and irrational, however having chosen what outcomes you care about, your best road to achieving them must be Bayesian.… perhaps. My problem with this whole Bayesian kick is that it reminds me of putting three masts and a full set of square-rigged sails on what is basically a canoe : the masts and sails are the Bayesian edifice, the canoe is our useful knowledge in any given real life situation.
Risk aversion, and the degree to which it is felt, is a personality trait with high variance between individuals and over the lifespan. To ignore it in a utility calculation would be absurd. Maurice Allais should have listened to his homonym Alphonse Allais (no apparent relation), humorist and theoretician of the absurd, who famously remarked “La logique mène à tout à condition d’en sortir”. Logic leads to everything, on condition it don’t box you in.
Just to respond to the theme that ‘right wing’ is a meaningless label, not so. It originally arose from the seating arrangements in the French Assembly, where the right wing were the monarchists. Hence right wing became generally accepted as a label for the authoritarian defence of a monarchic, aristocratic, or oligarchic power structure. As these power structure tended to be the ones in place, you have the confusion with Conservatism (e.g. Torys). By a further semantic slide, it came, for some, to mean any authoritarian power structure with power concentrated in the hands of the few, hence the lumping together of the various 20thC dictatorships as right wing. For those who conceive the power of ‘Big Business’ to be oligarchic and oppressive, any political program favourising the large corporations is right wing. One source of confusion between ‘right wing’ and Libertarianism comes from the disingenuous protests that any politics which limit the power of the corporate world are ‘attacking free enterprise’ thus, attacking individual freedom. This is compounded by the myths attached to the notion of private property, where ‘mine’ as in ‘my log cabin and my boots’ is extended to ‘my corporation over which I have Regalian powers’ simply because I invested some bucks in it 30 years ago. Libertarianism as described here seems to be a peculiarly American movement, which would map somewhat but not completely to the European anarchists. Finally, of course individual politics are multi-dimensional. However, all countries which aren’t dictatorships seem to end up with two party systems, so all those dimensions have to projected down, hopefully on a ‘best-fit’ basis, to the single axis most appropriate to the country in question.
Charlie (Colorado), I’d appreciate your thoughts on the difference between ‘hard core libertarian’ and ‘right wing’. For me they map to pretty much the same territory, obviously not for you.
When one got past pre-adolescence, one realised that Heinlein’s writing skills, such as they were, were in the service of a political philosophy somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun. Whatever floats your boat.
I just saw an incredibly beautiful sunset. I also see the beauty in some of EY’s stuff. Does that mean the sunset was Bayesian, or indeed subject to underlying lawfulness ? No, it only means my enhanced primate brain has a tendency to see beauty in certain things. Not that there is any more epistemic significance in a sunset than there is in a theorem.
OK thanks, nice intuition pump.
“only because our fundamental theory tells us quite definitely that different versions of us will see different results”.
EY, on what do you base your ‘quite definitely’ ? David Lewis ?
I suppose I should add, for those who are really stuck in maths or formal logic, that changing the definition of a symbol in a formal system is not the same thing as changing the meaning of a word in a language. In fact you can’t, individually and as a decision of will, change the meaning of a word in a language. It either changes, as per my previous comment, or it doesn’t.